Slouching Towards Utopia?: The Economic
History of the Twentieth Century

-IV. Genocide-

J. Bradford DeLongUniversity of California at Berkeley and NBER

January 1997

Magnitude of Twentieth Century Genocide

Origins of Twentieth Century Genocide

Communism and Nazism

Economic Ideology and Political Murder

This chapter carries a dark, grim message:
the boost to human productive, technological, and organizational powers
seen in the twentieth century was truly value-neutral. The century that
has seen the fastest economic growth and the richest human societies ever
has also seen the greatest--and multiple--genocides. The greatest crimes
of human history have been committed, and the greatest criminals of all
time have lived, in the past hundred years.

The table below presents a few estimates from R.J. Rummel's
Death by Government--a book that undertakes the grim task of attempting
to roughly count up the violent death toll of the twentieth century. Rummel
excludes from his count of genocide the deaths of soldiers in time of war,
and the "incidental" deaths of civilians in time of war (that
is, deaths that occurred as a consequence of what could be classified as
military operations directed against enemy armed forces or war-making power:
military exercises like the British night bombing of German cities during
World War II are counted as episodes of genocide). Rummel's estimates of
genocide are only of the people whom governments, in time of peace or far
from the battlefront, have killed.

Some of the estimates are solid; some are shaky; some
are wild guesses. Some are barely estimates at all: we know next to nothing
of what has gone on in North Korea over the past fifty years, and Rummel's
guess--he doesn't label it an "estimate"--is based on the projection
that North Korea has been no better and now worse than similar countries
with similar ideologies and similar degrees of self-imposed isolation.

I think some estimates are too high, and some are too
low (I suspect Communist China and Nazi Germany should be switched). But
Rummel's estimates are not without evidence, and on average I have no reason
to believe that they are biased in any systematic way.

Deaths as a result of military operations
in this century have been horrific enough: governments and their soldiers
have killed perhaps forty million people in war--either soldiers unlucky
enough to have been drafted into the mass armies of the twentieth century,
or civilians killed in the course of operations that generals could claim
were directed at reducing the enemy's war-making potential.

Civilians Killed by Governments
in the Twentieth Century: Top Twenty Regimes

Location (Regime)

Deaths

Era

Soviet Union (Communists)

61,900,000

1917-1990

China (Communists)

35,200,000

1949-present

Germany (Nazi Third Reich)

20,900,000

1933-1945

China (Kuomintang)

10,400,000

1928-1949

Japan (Imperial-Fascist)

6,000,000

1936-1945

China (Communist Guerrillas)

3,500,000

1923-1948

Cambodia (Communists)

2,000,000

1975-1979

Turkey ("Young Turks")

1,900,000

1909-1917

Vietnam (Communists)

1,700,000

1945-present

North Korea (Communists)

1,700,000

1948-present

Poland (Communists)

1,600,000

1945-1948

Pakistan (Yahya Khan)

1,500,000

1971

Mexico (Porfiriato)

1,400,000

1900-1920

Yugoslavia (Communists)

1,100,000

1944-1990

Russia (Czarist)

1,100,000

1900-1917

Turkey (Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk")

900,000

1918-1923

United Kingdom (Constitutional)

800,000

1900-present

Portugal (Fascist)

700,000

1926-1975

Croatia (Fascists)

700,000

1941-1945

Indonesia (Suharto)

600,000

1965-present

But the top twenty regimes have killed--roughly--156,000,000
civilians in this century. Wars have
been less than a quarter of this century's violent death toll. Far from
the battlefront and in time of peace, governments in this century have
bloody hands: class enemies, race enemies, political enemies, economic
enemies, imagined enemies--you name it, governments have slaughtered them
on a previously unimagined scale.

Let us call those leaders whose regimes
have slaughtered more than ten million of their fellow humans "members
of the Ten-Million Club." All pre-twentieth century history may
(but may not) have seen two members of the Ten-Million Club: Chingis (Ghengis)
Khan, the ruler of the twelfth century Mongols, the launcher of tremendously
bloody invasions of Central Asia and China, and the founder of China's
ruling Yuan Dynasty (Marco Polo's travels were to the court of the Yuan
Emperor Kubulai Khan); and Hong Xiuquan, the mid-nineteenth-century Chinese
intellectual who declared himself Jesus Christ's younger brother and launched
the Taiping Rebellion. No single individual played a significant role in
the creation and growth of the early modern Atlantic slave trade, or in
the disease-and-exploitation-driven decimation of the pre-Columbian populations
of the Americas. The first of these two historical episodes was on a super-genocidal
scale; the second is uncertain--it may only have been genocidal.

By contrast, the twentieth century has
seen perhaps five members join the Ten Million Club: in alphabetical order,
Adolf Hitler, Chiang Kaishek, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong.
Hitler, Stalin, and Mao have credentials that may well make them the charter
members of the Thirty Million Club as well--perhaps even the Fifty Million
Club: our knowledge of what went on inside China, the Soviet Union, and
the Third Reich is very imperfect. A regime whose hands are as bloody as
those of the Suharto regime in Indonesia-with the blood on its hands of
perhaps 450,000 communists, suspected communists, and others who simply
were in the wrong place at the wrong time at its creation in 1965, and
perhaps 150,000 inhabitants of East Timor since the Indonesian takeover
in the mid-1970s--such a regime barely makes the twentieth century's top
twenty list as far as the massacre of civilians is concerned.

Origins
of Twentieth-Century Genocide

Some have traced the beginnings of the
twentieth century's culture of genocide to the overturning of the traditional
rules of European war that sharply distinguished combattants from non-combattants.
In the Boer War at the turn of the century in South Africa the British
army found itself faced with a stubborn guerrilla movement after the defeat
of the Boer Republic's conventional armies. The British army responded
by inventing the concentration camp as we know it: depopulating the countryside,
and crowding civilians together. Disease spread though the camps and mortality
was relatively high--although lower than in virtually every other twentieth
century concentration camp.

Others trace it to the rhetoric of violence
that always accompanied Karl Marx's version of socialism. In Marx's writings,
democratic political institutions, individual rights, and public deliberation
are always masks and shams in the absence of substantive economic equality--and
were to be fought as fiercely as medieval barons who slaughtered peasants
for failing to pay feudal rents.

Still others trace it to the great French
Revolution of the eighteenth century, to political philosophers like Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, and to the idea that whatever political party represents the
Nation is engaged in a life-and-death struggle with Enemies, a struggle
in which scruples about means are out of place.

Still others say that it was there all
along, but that pre-twentieth century governments and religions by and
large lacked the organizational capability and certainly lacked a motive
to exterminate their fellow human beings by the tens of millions. They
could conduct pogroms, purges, and witch-burnings on a retail scale, and
only the absence of modern technologies of communication and organization
kept them from moving to the same wholesale scale of slaughter as the Khmer
Rouge. It was a French Catholic bishop who, when asked how to sort out
the heretics from the true believers in a newly captured city, is reported
to have said: "Kill them all!--God will recognize his people."

There is some truth to all of these interpretations.
For example, the practice of Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety during
the French Revolution in executing not just the leaders but also the followers
and families of their political opponents (a practice that Robespierre's
political opponents turned against him as soon as they could), the
practice of using the military to depopulate restive regions like the Vendee
of western France, and the practice of using rigged courts to give a thin
veneer of "legality" and due process to political murder did
have their origin in the French Revolution.

The first two major episodes of genocide
in this century, the perhaps one million peasants killed in Russia in the
last two decades of the Czarist regime and the perhaps than one million
civilians dead in the last year's of President Porfirio Diaz's rule and
the years of the Revolution in Mexico, look a lot like the traditional
use of violence by an aristocracy to maintain its power and wealth, only
writ larger as a result of better technologies of communication and organization.

But the greater power of governments to
organize and carry out purges, the sharpening of ethnic conflicts, and
the rising power of violent nationalism were, even together, not enough
to trigger the genocides of this century. That required two political movements:
Communism and Fascism. And both Communism and Fascism were movements that
had economic ideology at their core.

Communism
and Nazism:

Communism as we have known it was born
when Vladimir Lenin's fraction of the Russian left--the "Bolshevik"
or majority faction of the formerly-unified Russian Social Democratic Party--seized
power in a late-1917 coup from the post-Czarist provisional government
led by Kerensky. A brutal Civil War followed, as "White" supporters
of the Czar, local autocrats seeking effective independence, Lenin's "Red"
followers, stray other forces-- including a Czech army that found itself
first trapped in and then effective ruler of Siberia, and Japanese regiments
(the United States sent both troops to secure base areas for anti-Communist
forces, and food to feed Russians in Communist-controlled areas)--fought
back and forth over much of Russia for three years.

When the Civil War ended, Lenin's regime
was in control. The Czarist generals were dead or in exile in Paris. Any
liberal democratic or social democratic center had been purged by the Whites
or the Reds in the course of the Civil War. And the relatively small group
of socialist agitators that had gathered under Lenin before the revolution
found itself with the problem of running a country and building a utopia,
with the assistance of those who had declared for the Reds and against
the Whites and joined Lenin during the Civil War.

The first imperative facing Lenin's regime
was the necessity of eliminating capitalism. According to the Marxist theory
that Lenin deeply believed, capitalism--private ownership of businesses
and land, and private receipt of profits--was the source of inequality
or exploitation. But how do you run industry and economic life in the absence
of business owners--of people whose incomes and social standing depend
directly on the prosperity of individual enterprises, and who thus have
the incentives and the power to try to make and keep individual pieces
of the economy productive and functioning?

Lenin's answer was that you organize the
economy like an army: top down, planned, hierarchical, with under-managers
promoted or fired depending on how well they attained the missions that
the high economic command had assigned them. Lenin had been impressed by
what he saw of the German centrally-directed war economy of World War I.

The second imperative facing Lenin's regime
was to industrialize Russia. Frightened that the powers of the industrial
core might decide to overthrow their regime, and desperately aware of their
economic weakness, it seemed to Lenin and his followers that military discipline
in the service of industrialization was essential.

The third imperative was to survive. As
the British historian Eric Hobsbawm has written of Lenin's regime, "as
Lenin recognized... all it had going for it was the fact that it was...
the established government of the country. It had nothing else. Even so,
what actually governed the country was an undergrowth of smaller and larger
bureaucrats..." And for a government to survive when there are no
powerful social classes or interest groups that have ideological allegiances
or substantive reasons to back it requires great ruthlessness.

Great ruthlessness was exercised not only
against society outside the Communist Party but against the activists of
the Communist Party itself. A "command economy" turned out to
require a "command polity" as well. The Communist Party won the
Russian Civil War as a one-party dictatorship with a powerful and aggressive
secret police, committed to using mass terror to suppress counter-revolutionaries,
and banning even internal democracy and discussion of policies and politics.
As the German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg had warned, the process begins by
ruling in the name of the people, then by substituting the judgment of
the Party for the wishes of the people, then by substituting the decisions
of the Central Committee for the judgment of the Party, and then by substituting
the whim of the Dictator for the decisions of the Central Committee.

And the dictator who won the struggle
for power after Lenin's death--Josef Stalin--was a paranoid psychopath
to boot. Stalin made Lenin's terror look mild and reasonable.

Peasants were shot, died of famine, and
were exiled to Siberian prison labor camps in the millions during the 1930s.
Factory workers were shot or exiled to Siberian labor camps for failing
to meet production targets assigned from above. Intellectuals were shot
or exiled to Siberian labor camps for being insufficiently pro-Stalin,
or for being in favor of the policies that Stalin had advocated last
year and being too slow to switch.

Communist activists, bureaucrats, and
secret policemen fared no better. More than five million government officials
and party members were killed or exiled in the Great Purge of the 1930s
as well. All of Stalin's one-time peers as Lenin's lieutenants were gone
by the late 1930s-save for Leon Trotsky, in exile in Mexico, who survived
until one of Stalin's agents put an icepick through his head in 1940.

Of the 1800 delegates to the Communist
Party Congress of 1934, less than half were alive by 1939.

We really do not know how many people
died at the hands of the Communist regime in Russia. As Basil Kerblay write
in his Modern Soviet Society, we know more about how many cows and
sheep died in the 1930s than about how many of Stalin's opponents, imagined
enemies, and bystanders were killed. R.J. Rummel estimates 62 million dead.

The story of Mao in China is similar to
the story of Stalin in Russia: the same ruthless commitment to use any
means necessary to remake society and preserve Communist Party rule, the
same desire to override all other social forces and centralize economic
and social life into a near-military hierarchy, the same delusions of grandeur
and paranoia at the top. Mao's lieutenants were perhaps better than Stalin's
at attempting to ease him out of power and into symbolic retirement: Liu
Shaochi and Deng Xiaoping thought that they had achieved this in the aftermath
of the catastrophic economic policies of the 1950s that led to a great
famine that killed tens of millions. But Mao's lieutenants' willingness
to try to control their paranoid leader triggered the upheaval of the Cultural
Revolution, Mao's counterstroke in which he rallied the young and the ideologically
pure against the hierarchy of the Communist Party, and may in the end have
simply increased the death toll.

The third of the leaders of the most murderous
regimes of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany, probably
did not match up to his peers Stalin and Mao in length of his tyranny,
but surely was their master in evil. He gained a voice in German politics
by exploiting nationalist resentment against those who had beaten Germany
in World War I and the economic distress of the Great Depression. He took
power by outmaneuvering the right-wing politicians who had taken him into
the cabinet to boost their popular support.

He quickly turned Gemany into a centralized-totalitarian-dictatorship
in which, in theory at least, all social and economic institutions were
"co-ordinated" with the Nazi Party. "What need have we to
socialize industry or agriculture? We socialize human beings!" Up
until the start of World War II the terror was, by twentieth century standards,
relatively small: murder, imprisonment, and harassment of Jews, opposition
political activists, homosexuals, and some ofthe disabled and mentally
ill. After the beginning of World War II, the machine of extermination
was put in motion on a large scale. Some were worked to death in slave
labor camps at the disposal of German businesses like Krupp and I.G. Farben.
Some were shot by mobile extermination teams. Many were shot by the army
well behind the fighting lines. Some were left to die in concentration
camps. Many others were killed assembly-line fashion in extermination camps.

Stalin and Mao could point to reasons
--insane and mistaken reasons, true, but reasons nevertheless--why their
actions and killings made sense in terms of ends that we all share of general
prosperity and human development, and why they had chosen the path that
the poet W.H. Auden wrote of as "the acceptance of guilt in the necessary
murder." The Cultural Revolution in China was needed to keep China
a socialist country that could someday become a free and equal utopia,
to keep it from degenerating into a bureaucratic despotism like the Soviet
Union. The mass slaughter of the peasants of the Ukraine was necessary
because an agriculture based on private farming and small plots rather
than collective farming and industrialized agriculture could never produce
the increases in productivity needed to feed the growing cities of the
industrializing Soviet Union. These justifications were wrong--insanely
wrong--but economic development and the avoidance of bureaucratic despotism
are good things.

But Hitler? Killing in concentration camps,
extermination camps, and through forced labor, killing six million Jews,
two million of scattered nationalities from western Europe, and twelve
million or so from eastern Europe in addition to the battle-related
deaths of World War II? Why? To diminish the likelihood that the German
"race" would be further polluted through intermarriage, and to
provide more "living space" for German farmers.

Stalin and Mao still have their defenders:
people who admit with one hand that "there is no doubt that under
some other leader [than Stalin]... the sufferings of the peoples of the
[Union of Soviet Socialist Republics] would have been less, the number
of victims smaller"; yet with the other go on to write that:

any policy of rapid modernization in the
U.S.S.R... was bound to be ruthless and, because imposed against the bulk
of the people and imposing serious sacrifices on them, to some extent coercive...
closer to a military operation than to an economic enterprise. On the other
hand... the breakneck industrialization of the first Five-Year Plans (1929-41)
generated support by the very "blood, toil, tears, and sweat"
it imposed on the people.... sacrifice itself can motivate.

Hitler, however, does not have his defenders,
has no one to claim that he used perhaps excessive means to good ends.
His ultimate goals--the Aryan racial purity of the German people, and sufficient
"living space" at the disposal of the German nation to allow
it to dominate the world--are far, far outside the admissable bounds.

Economic
Ideology and Political Murder:

What does this bloody political and secret
police history have to do with economic history, with the story
of how people produced, distributed, and consumed the commodities needed
and desired for their material well-being? First, the possibility that
the secret police will knock at your door and drag you off for torture
and death is a serious threat to your material well-being. The seventeenth-century
political philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote that people are motivated by
sticks and carrots: "the fear of violent death, and the desire for
commodious living." In a century where the chance that a randomly-selected
person will be shot or starved to death by the government approached five
percent, the fact of large scale political murder becomes a very important
aspect of everyday life and material well being.

Second, the twentieth century is unique
in that its wars, purges, massacres, and executions were part of struggles
over economics. Before the twentieth century people killed each
other over theology: eternal paradise or damnation. Before the twentieth
century people killed each other over power: who gets to be top dog, and
to command the material resources of society. These motives are, to some
extent, comprehensible.

But only in the twentieth century have
people killed each other on a large scale in disputes over the economic
organization of society.

Communism saw itself as a utopian mode
of social and economic organization, engaged in a death struggle with the
other modes of "Capitalism" and "Feudalism." Opponents
of regimes had to die because their very existence was "objectively"
reinforcing the strength of the opposing modes of organization, and preventing
the achievement of universal prosperity and utopia.

Naziism was, in its origins, National
Socialism: the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Those Nazis
who took the "socialism" as implying a serious desire on the
part of a Nazi government to level the distribution of income died in the
1934 purge, a year and a half after Hitler took power. But anti-capitalist
rhetoric remained--a stock-in-trade of Nazi propaganda was always the contrast
between good hard-working German technicians and bad blood-sucking Jewish
financiers. And the Nazi justification for taking power was rooted both
in the desire to reverse the shame of Germany's defeat in World War I (and
the unequal treaty settlement imposed by the victors) and in the desperate
poverty of the Great Depression, which demonstrated the political bankruptcy
of the liberal Weimar Republic.

The economic ideologies of the Communists
and the Nazis did not play a significant role in boosting or maintaining
their power. The Communist Party chief of a Ukrainian village is and remains
boss whether the cattle are owned by individual farmers or by the village
collective. Lenin and his successors had little trouble maintaining political
control during the 1920s, the decade of the "New Economic Policy"
that saw the party allow the revival of private enterprise. And the flaws
in trying to run economic life through nationwide central planning were
obvious early in the regime. The Nazi government's power depended on its
use of the police and of terror. The expropriation of Jewish enterprises,
the gathering of much industry into the hands of second-in-command Hermann
Goering, and the attempt to impose central planning for military purposes
did not aid the Nazi regime: its success at mobilizing national economic
resources for World War II was less than that of Stalin's Russia, Churchill's
Britain, or Roosevelt's Ameria.

But these economic ideologies played an
enormous role in creating and energizing the movements, and in directing
their actions while they were in power.

Fidel Castro rules in Havana whether or
not farmers are allowed to sell their crops in roadside stands. Deng Xiaoping's
control over China was not impaired by his decision to be pragmatic: to
announce that a good cat was one that catches mice-not one that was the
ideologically-correct color. Power, personal status, and eternal salvation
had little to do with the Soviet collectivization of agriculture, the Cuban
suppression of small-scale markets, or the disaster of Mao's Great Leap
Forward. These were in large part and certainly appeared on the surface
to be attempts to guide and shift the economy in order to meet the
requirements that some ideology claimed were necessary.

Other twentieth century disasters had
equally strong roots in economic ideas: it is hard to see World War II
in the absence of Adolf Hitler's idee fixe that the Germans needed
a better land-labor ratio-more "living space", more lebensraum-if
they were to be a strong nation; beliefs that overseas colonies provided
powerful economic advantages fueled great power rivalries before World
War I.

Imperial Japan drew from its own and to
a much lesser extent the German militarist traditions. But its wave of
conquest drew inspiration from the European pattern of colonial empires,
and from economic theories that a country could not maintain full
employment and rapid growth without the "vent for surplus" production
and investment provided by a colonial empire. By 1936 Japan had a colonial
empire consisting of many Pacific islands, Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria.
Then the army decided to add much of China to the colonial empire; the
far eastern phase of World War II began; and perhaps five million Chinese
civilians died.

So a very important part of twentieth
century history is the fact that the causes of the bloodshed were in large
part economic ideologies: beliefs about how the world worked, and
how the economy should be organized.